Has Obama hurt himself in small-town Oregon?

The political commentariat is atwitter over the impact of Barack Obama's dissection of small-town discontent on the crucial Pennsylvania primary, rapidly coming up on April 22.

For anyone who has been hiding from the internet or the political chat shows, Obama set off tremors by declaring that when small-town working class voters are embittered by economic change, "they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

My more parochial interest is whether this changes the dynamics in Oregon's May 20 primary, where a recent poll showed Obama leading Hillary Clinton, 52 percent to 42 percent. That poll by Survey USA, actually showed Obama running slightly better outside of Portland (although the difference could just be the margin of error).

At any rate, the poll does suggest that Obama could have a problem if small-town voters take offense at his remarks. Oregon has a significant population outside the cities, even among Democrats who tend to be more clustered in urban areas.

By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, somewhere around 300,000 of the state's 775,000 registered Democrats live outside the metropolitan areas centered around Portland, Salem, Eugene and Medford (and I defined Corvallis as urban as well).

Of course, as much as geographic, it's also a sense of self. A union ironworker who lives in East Multnomah County, hunts and goes to church on Sunday could take more offense at those statements than a retired lawyer who lives on a Deschutes County ranchette.

Smart Democratic primary campaigns know they can't ignore conservative-to-moderate blue-collar voters while they're rushing to appeal to the party's liberal activists who make most of the noise in D primaries. I think back to 2002 when Ted Kulongoski's gubernatorial campaign sold him as a beer-and-bowling kind of guy in the primary. You didn't hear much that year about his real passion for backpacking and canoeing, and he beat two candidates who ran to the left of him.